Learning something new

[zimena]

So, for the n'th time in my life, I have decided that I want to learn programming. The last time I decided on this, I ended up reading a few lessons on C++, but I never got that far with the actual coding. Well, I have a few snippets of code that I wrote for those lessons, but by now I don't even remember much of that.

I also did not have a proper IDE back then, so I remember compiling those first few programs from the command line.

Now I have at least installed Xcode, so that makes testing things as I go along "a little bit" easier. I have also found a tutorial for beginners that I like. It's aimed at making iPhone apps, but for now I'm just learning very basic stuff anyway, so I might as well start there. The only problem? I didn't realises right away that it's a tutorial that was written back in 2013 (as in: before Apple introduced the Swift programming language), so it teaches Objective-C instead.

I don't know heads or tails about programming yet, but I do know that Swift is supposedly the standard in Apple-land nowadays, so that's what I should learn.

I like the way the "old" tutorial explains things, though. Also, it's just four lessons long, so I guess working through it might at least teach something about basic concepts and good patterns of thinking, even if things will obviously work differently when I find a proper Swift tutorial afterwards. So far, I've only found video tutorials for that, though - which isn't ideal for me, because I prefer working with text rather than video. I can see how videos might be useful, though - especially because it's more of a hassle to refer back to what the correct/working code looks like, so I imagine that I'd have to find my own mistakes more often if using this method of learning.

Well, at least I picked up a fun fact already: I now understand why there's a programming language called C++.

Comments

[zhelana]

OK so why is there a programming language called C++?

[catness]

Wow, this is great! So happy for you that you're enjoying the programming tutorial. It does sound weird that there are only 4 lessons, but hopefully it provides a good start, and it will be easier to continue with another tutorial or course.

I prefer text-based learning too, but all the "serious" e-learning sites (Coursera, Udacity, EDX, Codeschool etc) use videos, so I guess we just have to get used to it.

Good luck!

[yuuago]

I expect that it'll be easier to learn a second one after you've learned one language pretty well. Good luck with it!

[zimena]

The name seems to be a programming joke, actually, so you need to know that one way of increasing the value of a variable by one is to just type the variable name followed by ++. So "test++" will increase the value of the variable "test" by 1.

With this in mind, you can see that C++ must mean something like "one better than C". To me that was funny :)

[zhelana]

heh - that is funny :)